Section B
Evidence and insight: input from AUDE
AUDE Conference workshop, 15 April 2021: Informing Future Facing Design
The workshop drew on the EDU’s research repertoire, and our respective specialisms in user engagement, progressive building services, and holistic architecture, to enhance user experience, reduce lifetime and operational carbon emissions, and provide relevant, quality design that offers value for money.
Aimed at improving space utilisation and reducing carbon emissions on higher education estates, the session addressed the key topics of space utilisation, space management, and continuously optimising energy consumption to suit function and occupancy. Workshop participants were invited to share their experience in harnessing more for less, whether by levelling up poorer space, exploiting residual space, managing space more productively, responding to the implications of technology for new modalities of teaching, learning and sociability, and/or meeting widely increased aspirations for wellbeing. The outcomes from the workshop and subsequent interviews with some of the attendees helped frame and prioritise the key topics in this guide.
Participant perspectives
Carbon/energy reduction
Push to consolidate space (because space = carbon).
Questions around BREEAM, WELL and Passivhaus – all good in principle, but which are necessary?
Future-proofing – designing for end of life/disassembly.
Space concerns related to new ways of learning/working
Students – growing interest in mixed mode of campus/remote learning (allowing interaction with academics/campus).
Growing preference among academics for a blended approach of office/home working – this creates tension, as it means retaining offices that aren’t used very often.
Future ways of working impacting on HR, IT and the estate at large.
Embracing evolving pedagogy and new teaching methods, plus the smart technology to go along with these.
Inability for institutional governance to address poorly utilised office space (mainly due to competition created by the Research Excellence Framework and the need to attract/retain the best researchers – a challenge for Russell Group universities in particular).
Balancing different spaces – teaching spaces, social spaces, agile academic offices, etc.
Utilisation
Questions over how to measure this – what are the metrics, what is the baseline?
How to identify and analyse spatial data correctly?
Need to measure and factor in attendance of online students.
